


Of Mice and Agents

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen, Humor, Rats & Mice, slice of SSR life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7444951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The West Coast SSR never had the budget of the original agency. Unfortunately this means settling for a substandard and mouse-infested building.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Mice and Agents

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [О мышах и агентах](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7538404) by [Taytao](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taytao/pseuds/Taytao)



> Warning for non-graphic animal harm (to mice). [Sheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) requested this idea, based on a scene in the movie Spy (which is wonderful; if you like funny movies about lady spies being badass, I highly recommend it!), and also provided the title. I can't believe there is a canonical "Rats & Mice" tag, but apparently there is.

From the very beginning, the West Coast SSR had never had the budget of the New York office. Daniel tried not to think of it as a slight; it was just politics, the brand-new stepchild of the original agency having to scrounge for every penny while the lion's share of the funding was channeled to its big brother. In truth, when he'd first seen the number of zeroes in the budget he was going to be responsible for, he'd almost turned around and headed right back to his old desk in the New York office. It was a shocking feeling, to have that many people and that many resources depending on him. Even more shocking, however, was his slow realization of just how far the money _didn't_ go.

The building they leased and remodeled for the agency was ... cheap. It was cheap, and it was in a convenient location in downtown L.A., and those two things were unlikely to add up to a good combination, but they simply couldn't afford anything else big enough and secure enough that wasn't out in the hills somewhere. Rose, whose two decades of office experience turned out to make her an invaluable resource in setting up the new bureau, had helped him find it. 

The exterior was a closed storefront with its paint peeling in the blistering California sun, and the interior would need extensive work to accommodate the agency, but Daniel tried to tell himself that it didn't look _that_ bad. A spit shine and some interior walls ought to have it looking as good as new.

He hoped.

Then the real problems began to materialize as the contractors began to burrow into the place: substandard materials, shoddy foundations, a ceiling that was likely to collapse and kill them all in the event of an earthquake, which Daniel was informed were common out here.

"Nice place," Jack remarked when he showed up without warning to tour the new agency's facilities. They hadn't gotten around to doing anything with the exterior yet, so it didn't exactly make the best impression. And of course Jack showed up right on the heels of the discovery that only half the building was wired for electricity and half the existing wiring was standard for 1910 but dangerously substandard for 1946 ("severely nonuniform," was the declaration of the electrician, with an alarmed expression) so the walls were in the process of being ripped out, hanks of wiring hanging down and plaster dust covering the floor and contractors cheerfully shouting things like "It's only asbestos, Gary, it ain't gonna hurt ya!" to each other across the dust-filled room.

Daniel flipped him off. Jack laughed.

In truth, though, Jack actually _was_ helping. He was a dick about it half the time, but he seemed to be doing his best to lean on _his_ connections to make sure Daniel's branch of the agency was funded along with his own. And he'd been cheerfully willing to offer all the advice Daniel wanted (and some he didn't) for nothing more than the cost of a long-distance call.

And in a surprisingly short time, the brand-new headquarters of the brand-new West Coast SSR was done with renovations (only Daniel knew how half-assed they actually were) and it at least _looked_ like a proper covert-ops agency of the U.S. government. Sure, the air conditioning had only two settings ("Baghdad" and "Siberia"), the lights had a tendency to flicker uneasily, the restroom had a questionable rate of successful flushes, and everyone tried not to step on the squishy places in the linoleum of the basement labs, due to a certain superstitious concern about falling through into a tar pit (at least Daniel hoped it was only superstition).

But of course it was after Peggy came out to L.A., thus making Daniel desperately want the new office to look its best, that the rodents showed up. Or at least became numerous enough that they were now impossible to ignore.

***

"It's a rat."

"Excuse _me,_ who in this room has three degrees from three separate universities? It is clearly a common deer mouse, genus _Peromyscus_ \--"

"That shows what _you_ know. It's a house mouse, _Mus musculus_. Please note the nearly hairless tail."

"The deer mouse has a primarily hairless tail as well, you undereducated cretin."

Daniel reminded himself that he had hired all of these people and had no one but himself to blame. "I don't care what it's called," he said loudly, cutting through the argument. "What I care about is getting them out of the building."

"Oh that," Samberly said, looking up from his (and the others') study of the deceased specimen that had been shuffled off the mortal coil by Rose's coffee mug. "Call an exterminator."

Daniel took a deep breath and tried to channel his inner Peggy, or, failing that, his inner Jack, who had a surprisingly high tolerance for dealing with annoying people who could potentially get him things. "We have the West Coast's most brilliant minds in this room," he said, and was rewarded with a number of pleased and confused looks. "Surely you can figure out how to get the mice out of one building. Do it, please."

He walked out, leaving them in a babble of hushed and intensely intellectual conversation, feeling good about his leadership skills.

***

He was feeling less good about his leadership skills some time later, when the Whitney Frost and Vernon Masters situations were finally dealt with, leaving everyone enough time to notice there were now mice on the desktops, mice on the shooting range (at least those ones provided good target practice) and mice in the downstairs Auerbach agency, which Rose had hailed as a good way of deterring unwanted would-be talents.

"What's this, Samberly?" Daniel demanded, holding out his coffee mug with two mice getting cozy in it. " _What's this?!"_

"So, the thing is, Chief ..." Samberly's eyes roamed the lab and settled on a scientist at one of the back counters. "... it was Frank's idea," he finished, and beat a hasty retreat.

"Frank," Daniel said, advancing on him and trying very hard to remember the man's last name. Started with a W. Or a P. "Care to talk about our mouse problem? Our now exponentially worse mouse problem?"

"So, funny you should mention the exponential curve, Chief," Frank said, not looking up from his beakers. "That's more or less how mouse population growth goes."

"I _know,"_ Daniel said, holding out his mug. "They're having a rollicking good time in this cup here. And in my desk drawers. And in _everyone's_ desk drawers." He leaned close, drawing Frank's attention away from his experiment, with eyes nervously wide. "Frank, _what did you do?"_

"So," Frank said after a moment. "What we were _trying_ to do was produce a pheromone that would cause every mouse in the vicinity to flee the SSR."

"But that's not what's happening, is it, Frank?" Daniel demanded, shaking the mug under his nose. The mice were not deterred from their current activities.

"Noooo .... it's really more that every mouse in a four-block radius --"

"More like twelve," another scientist said, passing by with an armload of mousetraps.

"-- twelve-block radius appears to have been attracted here to, uh ..."

"Don't finish, Frank." Daniel desperately hoped that Jack, who was currently convalescing at the Stark mansion, never got wind of this. If he said a damn thing, Daniel was sending him home with a baker's dozen of pregnant mice in his suitcase.

Something they did not appear to have any shortage of, at the moment.

***

"Sousa, this desk drawer --"

"Needs to be oiled, I know."

"That wasn't what I was going to say. You know you have guests, right?"

Daniel looked up from retrieving a file from the cabinet in the corner. They had discovered that metal filing cabinets were essentially mouseproof, or at least could be made so. Many of the SSR's desks, on the other hand, posed a more difficult challenge, due to the ability of the mice to gnaw through wood. 

"No," he said flatly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I think it's begging."

"For the love of God, don't feed it." He had caught Agent Mendez teaching one of the damn things tricks on his desk the other day. In Mendez's defense, he was only 19. Daniel had still heartlessly sent him and his trick mouse down to the room that had been designated the Mouse Disposal Unit, or MDU.

"Don't be a heel, Sousa. He obviously has a family to feed. They appear to be setting up housekeeping in the letter 'C'. Shouldn't it be 'M'?"

"Get out of my chair, Jack, or I'll remove you."

From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Peggy spring into sudden motion at the desk just outside his office. She calmly picked a mouse out of her tea, dropped it into the jar on her desk (which already held three) and shoved the teacup to the edge of her desk with a casual hand, all without looking up from the report she was typing.

"We have to do something," he said, not really to Jack, who answered anyway.

"Yeah, you're a terrible host, Sousa. Don't you know you're supposed to feed guests?"

"Get _out_ of my _chair."_

***

It was Rose who eventually figured out something that worked, after the scientists flooded the offices with a gas that made everything temporarily uninhabitable by humans (but not mice) and the local mouse population turned out to be remarkably resourceful at avoiding both poison and traps (Daniel suspected collaborators).

Rose brought in cats.

She came in with a large mewing and hissing box, put it down on Agent Rosenbaum's desk, and out erupted approximately a hundred and ninety (it turned to be four) of the fastest and least friendly cats Daniel had ever encountered. They shot in streaks of black-and-white and gray to the farthest reaches of the room. There was some frantic squeaking. 

A few days followed which were somewhat hard on the softer-hearted members of the staff, not to mention the weak-stomached. On the bright side, they didn't have to feed the cats.

"My neighbor's cat had kittens last summer, so they're about a year old," Rose confided in Daniel. "They've been living in her shed. She helped me catch them so I could bring them here. What do you think, Chief?"

"I think you're a genius, Rose."

He went on thinking she was a genius right up until finding a mother cat curled around a batch of day-old kittens in his bottom desk drawer, but by then it was too late. The office was thoroughly infested with cats.

On the bright side, the agents loved them, they were generally considered to be good luck, and everyone loved bringing in scraps to feed them. All in all, Daniel decided it was an improvement over the mice.

Even if neither Jack nor Peggy would ever let him live it down.

***

However, Daniel did gain invaluable blackmail material when he discovered that Jack had smuggled out the mouse family from Daniel's desk drawer and now had a couple dozen (admittedly very cute and large-eyed) deer mice living in a glass fish tank in his room at Stark's mansion.

"I don't need this hassle," Jack grumbled, as if the mice had taken up residence on the top of his dresser all by themselves. "I'm going back to New York soon, you know."

"Exponential growth, Jack."

"I don't know what that means. Go away."

The kittens were about a week old. Daniel wondered at what age bringing them home to the mansion would be entirely out of the question, and whether Jack had been nice enough to him lately to offer to send one back to New York.


End file.
